Serving Time

SOVIET UNION

A Sakharov article appears

The strange machinery of Soviet public relations continues to grind out communications about dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov. In West Germany the mass-circulation daily Bild last week published a claim by Moscow-based Journalist Victor Louis, a favorite KGB conduit for slipping information to the West, that Sakharov, 63, had been released from a hospital in his exile home of Gorky. The scientist, he said, has resumed his private life by joining his wife in their apartment, and "is healthy again." The day after the Louis report appeared, Western journalists learned that the Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics had just published a learned article on the origins of the universe that was ostensibly written by the Nobel laureate. Both actions were evidently designed to palliate Western concern over the fate of Sakharov and his wife Yelena Bonner, 61, who was sentenced last month to five years of internal exile on charges of spreading anti-Soviet slander. Dissident forces reported that Bonner was preparing an appeal.

The Louis report came three weeks after ABC News broadcast a videotape that Louis had made available to Western media. While cheerily purporting to demonstrate that the Sakharovs are prospering in Gorky, the heavily spliced tape contained a sequence showing an emaciated Sakharov eating some food. If the scene was genuine, it indicated that Sakharov had at least briefly interrupted a hunger strike that he began in May in an attempt to pressure Soviet authorities into allowing his wife to leave the country for treatment of a heart condition.

Sakharov's article, "Cosmological Transitions with Alteration of the Metric Signature," is an attempt to postulate the existence of more than one time dimension in the physical universe. Friends of Sakharov believe the work is genuine and that it was submitted last March, six weeks before the physicist began his hunger strike. The piece ends with a poignant acknowledgment: "I thank my wife, Yelena Bonner, for her help." The remark intrigued Western diplomats in "Moscow. "It's a nice touch, but I don't think it means she is being rehabilitated," said one. Noted another of the decision to publish Sakharov's article: "It's designed to show the world, and in particular his fellow scientists in the West, that he is allowed to work."

There were reports in Moscow last week that Sakharov has submitted a second article to the physics monthly. An official of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which issues the journal, said he could not discuss work currently under consideration for publication.